Teens Raised by Technology

Renee Canada

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 24, 2000

OURS is a generation that has never quite gotten over its childhood.

With our blueberry iMacs, remote-control style Beetles, pocket-size cell phones and other toys, we are trying to reclaim the youth that many of us have breezed through too quickly, climbing our way up the ladders of success. You can see that childish frenzy in our eyes as we pilot our way through palm- sized gadgets, download the latest MP3s, and surf the endless waves of the World Wide Web.

Part of it all, of course, is due to the rapidly expanding technology, whose daily advancements make me feel as if we're still in our infant stages as a society. The world around us is so new that we can't help looking on with childlike amazement at all the exciting, almost Jetson-like inventions. Who would have thought even 15 years ago that we would be watching movies whose main characters are practically seamless, computer-designed replicas of reality? That we'd be reading e-books and taking classes in virtual classrooms?

Unfortunately, as we race to catch up on all the new technology, I fear that we're also feeling this intense pressure to race through life. Childhood seems to go by in a breeze compared with the generation of my parents. In the late '50s, my mother and her friends were still playing with dolls into their early adolescence.

Elementary school in Oakland opens time capsule from 1927San Francisco Chronicle

Brides of March walk through San FranciscoSan Francisco Chronicle

WildCare rescues Western scrub jay from rodent glue trapWildCare

The Regulars: The CarpenterJessica Christian

Today, 12-year-old girls are bouncing through puberty with alarming haste, wearing clothes that my mother won't even let me wear now at the age of 22. Today's children also have a technological and business savvy that is both admirable and frightening.

They are walking advertisements in their Nike sneakers, Old Navy cargo pants and Calvin Klein T-shirts. They eat Burger King fries and drink Pepsi in school cafeterias that used to sell withered string beans, Jell-O, and yesterday's meatloaf as today's spaghetti and meatballs. They know how to design a Web site, how to scratch their own CDs, and yes, how to roll on a condom. By the age of 18, they may have already earned their first millions from their own Internet start-up. But is this race to adulthood necessarily a good thing?

True, early in the 20th century, 15-year-olds might have already entered the workforce, been married off and raising children of their own. But with reform in child-labor laws, a rise in the targeted youth market by advertisers,

and an extended life span due to health care advances, childhood became a prolonged experience, where adolescents -- half adult, half child -- struggled to define themselves in the world.

The invention of the teenager somewhere in the '40s and '50s provided an important buffer between childhood and adulthood. The teenage period was a time for people to begin to make grown-up decisions and mistakes, while still under the shelter of childhood. It allowed people to have a longer period to figure themselves out and to prepare for adult life in a more protected environment.

The modern world sees adulthood once again creeping back into adolescence. Children are committing serious criminal offenses, often facing adult punishment for these adult crimes. However, the punitive system is also becoming more gun-shy with less serious offenses; suspending 6-year-old boys for kissing little girls on the cheek and expelling teenagers for writing imaginative horror stories in their high school English classes. When we should be encouraging kids for positive, youthful pursuits, instead we're punishing them for fear that they will generate the next Columbine disaster.

Mirroring their parents, by the age of 11, many children are already accustomed to popping pills to help them get through the day. Some hyperactive toddlers are already being prescribed Ritalin to harness the really "terrible two's." And in the past five years, antidepressant prescriptions for teens have increased 80 percent. Going through cycles of depression and hyperactive joy is part of the natural process of being a teenager, thanks to our raging hormones, though we often hate it while going through it. Yet, psychiatrists seem over-eager to prescribe adult medicine like Prozac for normal teenage mood swings.

How can teenage years be preparation for adulthood when adult life so closely resembles the one they've been living all this time? As we push kids to grow up faster and faster, we're depriving them of some very special growth periods that are necessary for children to develop into mature, responsible, healthy adults.

Perhaps I am becoming jaded already, only a few years past my teenage years.

The sheltered experiences of my youth differ drastically from the world of today, where computer technology changes at least every six months and where advertisers have tapped extensively into marketed youth, who not only make more decisions about what they want, but are also increasingly finding more ways to get them. The "cute" phrase about children raising their parents doesn't just apply to learning about technology.

The children of the dried-up hippies have more choices in their upbringing than previous generations, and they aren't afraid to make their opinions known.

While some freedom in raising children is a good thing, too much freedom has a way of biting us back in the ankles. Broadly accepting or closing our eyes to everything a child does makes for certain disaster. Too much responsibility also can be dangerous when children aren't allowed to benefit from the gradual, cognitive developments that time and play gives us.

The mixed messages of both responsibility and freedom pervade this society in a disturbing way, when there is not a healthy balance for children nor for adults.

In order to handle the rapidly changing technology to which our society is a slave, I believe it's important for us to slow life down a little bit and really examine how each change is going to affect our society. Trying to throw too much on ourselves all at once is sure to backfire on us, and I fear the damage may be most acute on our children.

There is something quite special about the innocence and fresh wonder that children bring to the world, a view from which we would all benefit to adopt from time to time. Ripping that from children at too young an age will, I believe, do more to cripple our society than to strengthen it.

So, as we stare at our computer screens with awe and amazement, let us also remember to look to our children, to spend as much time nurturing their developing years as we do with our technology.